Vaults：加密市场重建万亿美元级基础设施

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Adrian Kechinad. He is the co-founder of Steakhouse. [music] Steakhouse is a curator in the vault space, and we're going to learn a lot about vaults today. Adrian, welcome to the show.

Hey, nice to be here.

Adrian, how bullish are you on vaults as a sector?

Obviously very bullish. But I think it would be cool to try and unpack a little bit what vaults means.

Mhm.

It's a very It's a very jargon-loaded term. It can mean a lot of things. Um we're obviously very bullish on the types of vaults that we're building. And there's lots of And we're bullish on types of vaults that nobody's building yet. As a idea, the idea that you can intermediate and value exchange without an intermediary or without relinquishing custody or without or doing it in a way that's purely ministerial or without discretion, I think this is quite new for finance.

And to the degree that a vault enables this is bullish, I think, because it represents a more efficient market. And we believe one with that offers better investor protections, as well.

Mhm. Yeah, maybe I think it's worth going into just the word vault, the vault word. Maybe maybe the best parallel to talk about what a vault is is to like talk about the token. It's like, what's a token? Well, a token could be anything. Like it it's really just a symbol, a token of whatever we want to ascribe to it. And we can ascribe to it meaning, value, mechanisms via code. And so, is a token a security? Well, that depends.

You know, is a token a utility? Well, that depends. And like vault A vault is very similarly as broad and undefined as the word token. And maybe maybe that is like a starting place helps illustrate just the immense breadth of category of what a vault can do. Maybe maybe you can take that and run with it. And also maybe give us a little bit of a history lesson about like the vault sector, how vaults came to be and how it's grown into what it is today.

Yeah, I think that's definitely the right way to to think about it. Very much like in the along the lines of the definition of like what's a token? Oh, it can can be so many things. Like similarly a vault was what is a vault? A vault can be so many things. And I think DeFi summer with the food farms, you know, the food farm era and the Yams and all this. That was really where you saw the first vaults with yearn. They had the the first architect the the first smart contract architecture that would allow people using vaults to delegate basically the selection of let's say a strategy to a smart contract.

And but they only really took off I think they really took off with Morpho. Morpho invented the well, maybe didn't invent but Morpho pioneered the concept of an isolated risk market for borrow and lend. This had obviously been tried before in different contexts. Uh but Morpho really let's say formalized it uh hit it with an appropriate level of go-to-market, you know, found a good fit. The difficulty with an isolated uh borrow and lend market is that you lose a lot of the network effects from a pooled lending model.

So [clears throat] something like Aave where all the liquidity is pooled has the benefit of re-hypothecation of collateral. So you can deposit the collateral and borrow against it at the same time. Uh with Morpho you lose that and so they use the idea of a vault as a way of aggregating liquidity around these isolated markets to recapture and rebundle some of that uh network effect again.

Would you say that Morpho [clears throat] kind of produced the basic atomic units of markets that when composed together via vaults, which is what a vault does, uh turns it into something bigger. But, it was important for the foundation of the vault industry to have these isolated lending markets to become very specific and opinionated and kind of like fit the demands of the market. And with these atomic units uh going down just to to the bare basement of like the the borrowing and lending markets, we can start to build up more stable structures because we have all these atomic units of these isolated risk markets.

Would you say that's a fair description?

Yeah, for sure. It's a philosophy that we very much agree with. I think it speaks to like the experiments with DeFi that work the best tend to take this direction. Smart contracts are very sensitive infrastructure to build anything on. They can go like when they go wrong, they go very wrong. So, you should you should aim to reduce the risk surface as much as possible. You have governance heavy heavily controlled like DAO governed whatever models from the early stages of DeFi.

And the Morpho approach is to try and boil it down back to what's the simplest possible like smart contract as a spreadsheet. Like I just want the spreadsheet formula to calculate how much interest is accrued on one side and owed to the other. And that's it. Uh that makes the surface much smaller. It uh you know, it loses all of the network effects, but it also makes it recomposable and re- you can rebundle it later on.

And don't the network effects kind of just come back around at a higher level in this stack later? So, an individual Morpho market doesn't really have too much network effects, but the network effects emerge once the recomposition of these atomic units come together, and that's that's in the vault space.

Correct. Yeah, for sure. So, like an individual borrow position in Morpho has very limited network effect. Network effect meaning the value of the network increases with the more like increases faster the more people uh use the same product. An individual borrow position on a Morpho blue isolated borrow lend market has very little of that. When it's aggregated in a vault, it starts to it gains value faster the more people start to use the vault to aggregate the liquidity because more loans can be issued and the more loans are are issued the more efficient the market becomes and so forth.

Mhm. Okay, so Morpho produces the isolated markets. Vaults emerge because they start to become composed together. But where where is the typical place that vaults are produced or accessed or you know, I can go to morpho.com and look at the the markets, but like where where are the vaults? Where are the vaults?

[laughter]

Where are the vaults?

They're in lots of places. So, the Morpho vault is one flavor of vaults, right? Like I think a simple way of thinking of a vault is a token that aggregates liquidity for a goal. And that's where I think you can start to you you start to really suss out the differences between different types of vaults. We like the Morpho vault a lot because it's very simple. It's very minimal and very governance light. Uh obviously you can have vaults that are more complex.

Something like a Veda vault is a more complex execution layer. That has a vault as a liquidity aggregator, but that allows more actions or discretion at the operator level, let's say. Um yeah, vaults.defiy.com is a good place to shop around. Beefy makes some very tasty vaults. It's it's a it's a word like a token. It depends what you're looking for.

So, after Morpho produces a bunch of isolated lending markets and then also Beta, there's a few other vault producers. How would What would you name the category of Beefy and Beta and and Morpho? What are these things?

Yeah, like vault infrastructure.

Vault infrastructure. Okay. So, first at the bottom layer is vault infrastructure, which produces many, many, many isolated lending markets or in the case of like Beta, maybe a little bit more opinionated, but that's still nonetheless the bottom the bottom of this stack. Next comes the curators. Now, that's where a lot of uh opinions can be expressed. So, maybe we can start um I just want to kind of get a lay of this land of this next highest level in the tech stack.

Maybe we can start about uh talking about like kind of the very Cypherpunk, totally um uh non-custodial, very safe end of what

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